Upgrades…

The new look and feel hasn’t gone down quite as well as we’d hoped with a few of the users (atleast those that have mailed us and let us know 🙂 ) so we have begun the process of looking through the feedback we’ve received to work out what to do from here.

You’ll notice that the colours have changed from their Pink to the new Green layout so hopefully that addresses all the people that emailed us exclaiming ‘PINK??!! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING??’ hehehe 🙂 In hindsight, we can probably agree with that sentiment 🙂

The Pencil is another hot request, while it was there we had people complaining they didn’t want it and now it’s gone we get other people complaining they liked it 🙂 As a result, we’re planning on re-introducing it perhaps in 2.2 as a replacement for the DearDiary.NET bar at the top (optional, some people (including us) prefer the new bar, some people prefer the old pencil) – but, we’re all for giving lots of options so here ya go 🙂 We’ll try to make it so that the colour of the pencil can be changed as well, which should eliminate a lot of problems with the Red Pencil clashing on diaries 🙂

There were a few problems with people losing passwords but they seem to have tapered off now, probably all kinds of reasons behind them so I’m not going to investigate that one too far at the moment. We had one problem with the new ‘update details’ screen but that is now resolved as well.

Another common complaint with the new Look and Feel has been the Recent Updates panel – we removed the date and time of the update in order to make it fit into a smaller space, it turns out that this is a hotly liked feature 🙂 I’ve added them back in, using a more brief format so it hasn’t cost the page too much in width but both the date and time of the update are now shown once more.

I’m going to play around with re-ordering the front page to see if I can answer a couple of other requests shortly as well, we’ll see how that gets on.

If anyone sees TWO banners by the way, that is NOT correct – please report it to us immediately and tell us what browser/environment you are using (eg. Web TV) so that we can chase it up. When I tested the system under the WebTV developers kit earlier this morning I noticed that it was coming up with the two banners and a bunch of Javascript complaints, which sadly are in the hands of the banner provider, so we’re aiming to get a fix for that as soon as possible.

We very much appreciate the comments (and even the complaints) that people have been sending in – without your criticisms we can’t improve the site in the right direction quickly and efficiently so don’t be afraid, don’t hold bad, send in your comments. All I would say is that the support address is manned by human beings and occasionally we’re rumoured to have feelings so don’t just mail us and tell us why something is crap, explain what you don’t like about it and perhaps, if you can, come up with a suggestion for improvement.

So far all of the emails to the support address have been very polite and helpful and we’re really appreciative of that 🙂 We’re not trying to make life hard, we’ll help wherever we can 🙂

Anyway, I’m gonna go make a start on P3 now as a break before I start on Dear Diary 2.2 🙂

Matt.